Kurt Vonnegut's 1988 Letter to the Future More Relevant Today Than Ever Before

Kurt
Vonnegut's 1988 Letter to the Future More Relevant Today Than Ever Before

By Kick Kennedy, EcoWatch

31 July 16

In
1988, my then Hyannis Port neighbor the late Kurt Vonnegut wrote a prescient
letter to the Earth's planetary citizens of 2088 for Volkswagen's TIME magazine
ad campaign. His seven points of advice are perhaps more relevant today than at
any time in human history. We should keep this advice in mind this election
year and adopt Vonnegut's recommendations while we still can.

Here's
his letter:

Ladies
& Gentlemen of A.D. 2088:

It has
been suggested that you might welcome words of wisdom from the past, and that
several of us in the twentieth century should send you some. Do you know this
advice from Polonius in Shakespeare's Hamlet: 'This above all: to thine own
self be true'? Or what about these instructions from St. John the Divine: 'Fear
God, and give glory to Him; for the hour of His judgment has come'? The best
advice from my own era for you or for just about anybody anytime, I guess, is a
prayer first used by alcoholics who hoped to never take a drink again: 'God
grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change
the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.'

Our
century hasn't been as free with words of wisdom as some others, I think,
because we were the first to get reliable information about the human
situation: how many of us there were, how much food we could raise or gather,
how fast we were reproducing, what made us sick, what made us die, how much
damage we were doing to the air and water and topsoil on which most life forms
depended, how violent and heartless nature can be, and on and on. Who could wax
wise with so much bad news pouring in?

For
me, the most paralyzing news was that Nature was no conservationist. It needed
no help from us in taking the planet apart and putting it back together some
different way, not necessarily improving it from the viewpoint of living
things. It set fire to forests with lightning bolts. It paved vast tracts of
arable land with lava, which could no more support life than big-city parking
lots. It had in the past sent glaciers down from the North Pole to grind up
major portions of Asia, Europe, and North America. Nor was there any reason to
think that it wouldn't do that again someday. At this very moment it is turning
African farms to deserts, and can be expected to heave up tidal waves or shower
down white-hot boulders from outer space at any time. It has not only
exterminated exquisitely evolved species in a twinkling, but drained oceans and
drowned continents as well. If people think Nature is their friend, then they
sure don't need an enemy.

Yes,
and as you people a hundred years from now must know full well, and as your
grandchildren will know even better: Nature is ruthless when it comes to
matching the quantity of life in any given place at any given time to the
quantity of nourishment available. So what have you and Nature done about
overpopulation? Back here in 1988, we were seeing ourselves as a new sort of
glacier, warm-blooded and clever, unstoppable, about to gobble up everything
and then make love—and then double in size again.

On
second thought, I am not sure I could bear to hear what you and Nature may have
done about too many people for too small a food supply.

And
here is a crazy idea I would like to try on you: Is it possible that we aimed
rockets with hydrogen bomb warheads at each other, all set to go, in order to
take our minds off the deeper problem—how cruelly Nature can be expected to
treat us, Nature being Nature, in the by-and-by?

Now
that we can discuss the mess we are in with some precision, I hope you have
stopped choosing abysmally ignorant optimists for positions of leadership. They
were useful only so long as nobody had a clue as to what was really going
on—during the past seven million years or so. In my time they have been
catastrophic as heads of sophisticated institutions with real work to do.

The
sort of leaders we need now are not those who promise ultimate victory over
Nature through perseverance in living as we do right now, but those with the
courage and intelligence to present to the world what appears to be Nature's
stern but reasonable surrender terms:

1.Reduce
and stabilize your population.

2.Stop
poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.

3.Stop
preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.

4.Teach
your kids, and yourselves, too, while you're at it, how to inhabit a small
planet without helping to kill it.

5.Stop
thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.

6.Stop
thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive
you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is
really mean, and stupid.

7.And so
on. Or else.

Am I
too pessimistic about life a hundred years from now? Maybe I have spent too
much time with scientists and not enough time with speechwriters for
politicians. For all I know, even bag ladies and bag gentlemen will have their
own personal helicopters or rocket belts in A.D. 2088. Nobody will have to leave
home to go to work or school, or even stop watching television. Everybody will
sit around all day punching the keys of computer terminals connected to
everything there is, and sip orange drink through straws like the astronauts.

"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs